The Presidency

By Hugh Sidey

Washington's springtime lapse from civility is as worrisome as the issues that provoked the bitterness. Not in many a year have there been such relentless partisanship and personal rancor along the capital's leafing avenues. There is no immunity. Not only has the running Democratic-Republican battle been raised to new intensity, but in the general melee, conservatives have attacked conservatives, legislative allies have thumped one another, special interests have zinged their benefactors, and friends have criticized friends.

Clark Clifford, the former Truman aide who has monitored the political mayhem for four decades, looked out his office window at the White House last week and said, "There is a greater stridency than I remember. We are in a troubled period." The late Vice President Hubert Humphrey, himself battered by a wave of national protest, foresaw the problem years ago. "The first sign of a declining civilization," he fretted, "is bad manners."

A few weeks ago, Peter McPherson, Reagan's foreign aid administrator, appeared before conservative critics to explain grants to famine victims in Africa and the U.N.'s fund for population control. Paul Weyrich, director of the Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress, turned on McPherson at one point and said, "You're a disgrace. You are unfit to be in your current position." Weyrich's intemperance arose from his singular fears that American funds could be used for abortions and to feed starving people under Marxist governments.

Iowa's new Democratic Senator Tom Harkin, barely introduced to the rituals of the cloakroom, was bumping along the back roads of Nicaragua a fortnight ago accusing President Reagan of "deception, distortion and duplicity." Former Secretary of State Dean Rusk may have had a point when he said, "Give a member of Congress a junket and a mimeograph machine, and he thinks he is Secretary of State." When Harkin and his fellow freshman Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts got home brandishing a cease-fire proposal from Nicaragua's President Daniel Ortega Saavedra, the venerable Republican Barry Goldwater said they both ought to be reprimanded for interfering in the President's business.

Republicans swatted their House leader Robert Michel for being defeatist on contra aid. Reagan bashed Congress for "surrendering" to Communists. USIA Director Charles Wick, a close Reagan friend, zapped his old buddy for wanting to lay a wreath at the Bitburg cemetery. Jewish groups continued to denounce his German itinerary. Reagan has been a great booster of the military, but that did not stop the American Legion from getting in some licks about Bitburg too.

For several years Speaker Tip O'Neill has kept some key House committees at a 2-to-1 ratio of Democrats to Republicans. This has rankled the G.O.P., which argues that a ratio of 3 to 2 would be more in line with overall party representation in the chamber. Last week that resentment flared over the contested Indiana seat that committee Democrats declared belonged to Frank McCloskey, one of their own. Even usually calm and gentle souls like Wyoming's Dick Cheney declared war and kept the House sleepless and fuming through Monday night and in parliamentary uproar all week long.

There used to be a solid center that shamed the jesters and smothered the nonsense with dignity and a call to high ideals. Ike was in the White House. Sam Rayburn ran the House. Men like George Aiken and Richard Russell resided in the Senate. When they gathered to deal with critical issues they were not Republicans or Democrats or liberals or conservatives. They were men with a larger purpose than themselves. It seems too long a time since the likes of them.